Author: Christophe Biocca 2014-04-24 14:47:35
Published on: 2014-04-24T14:47:35+00:00
The enforcement of widespread censorship rules could become a serious issue for Bitcoin miners. Coinbase confiscations, in particular, would be a worse mechanism for enforcement than simple orphaning, as the latter loses its power when transaction miners build up over time without losing their usefulness. In a scenario where 75% of hashpower is coerced into stealing or burning the coinbases of miners who allow transactions to and from certain addresses, the remaining 25% would mine according to the enforced rules most of the time. They would accept banned transactions paying them with an output and keep them in an ever-accumulating pool. When there are enough transactions to make it worth their while, they would mine a block filled with them.Miners that don't orphan the block would make money, and retaliating further wouldn't be possible because the anonymous block could be published without being tied to their previous identity. The mechanism is tailored to blocking time-sensitive transactions that need to be confirmed soon, such as double spending. However, it's uncertain if there are other good examples of this kind of censorship. In a dystopian future, orphaning would be the primary enforcement mechanism, as it would be foolish to rely on coinbase reallocation/burning for this task when existing tools work much better. It's also important to note that this mechanism is especially useful for blocking time-sensitive transactions, where total out-of-band fees can't build up over time.Mike Hearn's suggestion of deleting/stealing coinbases if miners don't identify themselves is seen as a huge leap. The majority of miners deciding that double spending needs tougher enforcement doesn't necessarily imply that all miners should identify themselves, as those are unrelated issues. Unsupported "obvious next step" arguments like this one can be applied to any proposal in any walk of life and sound absurd because they're not obvious or even logical.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T20:45:08.648666+00:00